


Wilhelm

by InfernalPume



Category: Original Work
Genre: Childhood, Dissociation, Narrative, WW2, loose connection to canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-08-31 23:59:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8599018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InfernalPume/pseuds/InfernalPume
Summary: A story about Wilhelm





	1. Chapter 1

Wilhelm likes dogs, running in circles, and his toy harmonica.

 

Emmaline says that Lolly wont allow any dogs at their boarding house; but for his 5th birthday Marina gave Wilhelm the toy harmonica, which he likes to play as he skips in spastic circles. Sometimes Wilhelm plays at the door of his favorite place and hopes that someone will think he’s talented enough to be invited inside. His concept of what lies within building is hazy, but can hear laughter and the notes of a piano drifting from the windows above. So Wilhelm spits air into his instrument outside, blowing harder whenever he notices someone is looking at him, not noticing how the high pitched note makes them freeze and look around in a state of anxiety.

 

When he grows up, he is going to go into there everyday so he can listen to the piano.

 

Maybe by then he’d have a grown up harmonica, the kind that looks like gold but Emmaline says isn’t _really,_ just a sort of tin shined a certain way to be glittery and yellow like the middle parts of automobile wheels. He doesn’t mind. If he had a shiny one like that they would _have_ to let him inside. He might not only get to listen to the piano, but maybe play along as with his grown up harmonica. Maybe someone will let him play the piano too. Maybe he’d be so good at playing the piano Lolly would be convinced to put one in the boarding house common room so he could play all the time. Maybe he could tell one of the young men from his favorite place that he had a piano at home. Maybe a nice man would come over to play. Maybe they’d bring a dog. Lolly could fall in love with him, and because of that wouldn’t mind keeping the dog. Wilhelm would be able to run in circles playing his harmonica, stopping only to run his hands across the dog’s soft fur.

 

Wilhelm has stopped playing his toy harmonica.

 

Instead he is leaping and pacing in circles, wondering what kind of dog he’d want the man to bring and wondering if the dog would know any tricks. He could teach the dog tricks. He could be so good at teaching the dog tricks that he is hired by a circus. The toy harmonica gets sweaty as he grips it in his palm, completely forgotten. He plays the part of both handler and beast, announcing the feats of his dog to an imaginary audience before yipping and pantomiming jumping through hoops.

 

A man comes down the stairs, and he is not like the others. He resembles the man in blue who likes to punch people in the part of newspapers that have colorful pictures in them. Wilhelm knows that the man in blue is a hero, a hero who will save the day if Wilhelm eats his vegetables. Wilhelm wishes he had eaten his vegetables last night, so he could ask if the hero would let him go see the piano. The man looks at him as if he expects Wilhelm to have something to say. When Wilhelm doesn’t say anything, the man orders him to speak louder. The command makes Wilhelm scared, and wonders if he is going to be punched. The man sighs and asks where Wilhelm’s parents are and Wilhelm says they’re fighting the nasties. The hero makes an aggravated sort of noise and tells Wilhelm to go home.

 

On the way home Wilhelm practices his harmonica as golden light slides over the rooftops. Wilhelm opens his mouth, expecting the glow to taste like Lyle’s Golden Syrup. If he concentrates hard enough, he can just barely feel the sticky sweetness on the back of his tongue.


	2. Chapter 2

Emmaline is cross with him when he gets home and asks if he has been to his favorite place again. Upon hearing he had she crosses her arms, drags him to the washroom, and insists on scrubbing him even though he had bathed just this morning for Sunday Church. In between dunking his head into the cold water, she says he is not to go back there while simultaneously refusing to explain why. Wilhelm likes the word ‘why’, it brings to mind an image of a whale opening its mouth to sing a song.

 

As he snuggles into his covers hours he waits for Marina to come home with the letters. As his sister opens the door to their room and hangs up her coat, she shakes her head. Wilhelm sinks into the sheets, disappointed. Sometimes there are no letters, but on the _best_ days there are two or three and Wilhelm gets to stay up later listening to Marina read them all. The letters were filled with words he didn’t understand and spoke about people he had never met, but Emmaline said that as long as they kept receiving letters, they might still go home someday.

 

Wilhelm didn’t really know of ‘home’ or understood the difference between there and where he lived now, but it was obvious from how Marina and Emmaline spoke of the place that it was somewhere of great importance. It was the place where all three of them had been born, where Mummy and Daddy were now. Their family lived there together when he was a baby, but because of the nasties Wilhelm and his sisters had to leave.

 

Wilhelm didn’t remember anything about home, or even Mummy and Daddy for that matter. Sometimes when he thought very hard at night he could just remember Mummy’s voice, but realized that he was just imagining Emmaline reading the letters.

 

Emmaline kisses Wilhelm and retreats to her own bed, assuring him that the postman must have had too a busy day. Insisting they would get to read them tomorrow, Marina reminded Wilhelm to sleep as he had school tomorrow.

 

Wilhelm scowls because he does not want to go to school tomorrow, or any other day for that matter. They take away his harmonica and punish him for ‘mumbling’. The collar of his uniform hugs his neck too tight, and when the teacher calls his name for roll the other kids snicker and say “Hamburger” under their breath. But worse then the boring lectures and daily embarrassment, Wilhelm had a personal vendetta against the establishment.

 

Apparently when Wilhelm had just began to talk his voice sounded like Emmaline’s and Marina’s, the same way Mummy and Daddy’s voices probably sounded. But after a few days at school Wilhelm began to talk like the other kids, and by the time he realized what as happening it was too late.

 

Once Wilhelm had heard an older child saying that once you are a grown up you cant change the way you talk anymore. Burying his face into the covers Wilhelm worried that maybe when it was time to go home he would be to different from the rest of the family. Every day he went to school was another day he was speaking incorrectly, and in a very secret place in his heart he was worried Mummy and Daddy might not know he was their son because of it.

 

He soon hears Marina’s voice in the darkness, telling him to stop whispering under his breath. In the silence she continues to beg him to just be quiet, or to say the words louder if there was something he wanted to say.


	3. Chapter 3

Wilhelm is out in the hall again. It aggravates him because if one of the light fixtures were just a few inches closer its neighbor, it would look like a smiley face. Marina used to help him find faces in the woodwork, but since he started coming to school he finds he can see faces in all sorts of things.

 

When peers and teachers pass they stop momentarily before continuing on their way. He wonders if they are looking for faces too. When his teacher comes out of the classroom he points to the almost smile, but she doesn’t look. She asks if he is read to behave, and he says that he is. She is about to let him back inside when her jaw tightens and she tells Wilhelm to be quiet. Wilhelm nods, but she keeps telling him to stop talking. Finally she hands him his notebook and tells him to practice his letters outside until he learns to respect his elders.

 

Wilhelm will not begin until she is gone. He sits on the floor and messily copies the symbols from memory, mouthing the sounds that correlated with each. It was rather difficult without the teachers help, and he is sure that he is getting most of them wrong because he is finished far too quickly. Wilhelm tries to draw the blue hero in the margin. It looks more like a pig. He draws ears and a curly tail and wonders if the blue hero would want a pig as a crime fighting companion. Space man had a dog after all. What if the pig hero was Wilhelm’s pig? He could probably teach a pig to fight nasties just as easily as he could a dog tricks. Would the blue hero thank Wilhelm for giving him his pig? Maybe Wilhelm would be allowed to help. He could maybe train other animals too, his special powers could be the ability to train animals to fight nasties.

 

Between his notes Wilhelm drew a circus of animals in masks and capes, kicking and biting strange scribble people with thick angry eyebrows. After growing bored with that Wilhelm closes his book, and for the first time notices the letters along the back. Curiously, he attempts to sound them out one by one.

 

Upon reading his name for the first time Wilhelm realizes that other people know he exists. He frightened by the concept, so he shakes his head until the white wallpaper turns yellow.

 

In the nurses office he asks what an ‘enema’ is. The nurse unwraps a plaster from its packaging and questions where he heard the word. Wilhelm tells her Marina and Emmaline both work at the hospital, but wont tell him what the word means. The nurse smiles and shakes her head, saying that if he were a good boy he most likely would never find out. Never finding out didn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d be rewarded for, but Wilhelm shrugged and held still as the scrape on his forehead is wiped clean before the nurse sticks the plaster. Wilhelm asks if he broke his head open, to which the nurse answers that children are designed to bump into things. When she is satisfied that there is no more damage then the small scrape, she gently persuades him not to shake his head when walking.

 

Wilhelm decides that he likes the nurse, so he complains that he is dizzy so she’ll let him sit in her office for a bit longer. He is given a cup of water and told to sit quietly in a chair until his head stops spinning.

 

The nurse at first asks him to speak up, but then tells him to try and be quiet while she is working.

 

While he watches her fill out forms and answer the telephone Wilhelm notices a small bookshelf. Hoping to find some picture books of the blue hero, Wilhelm is disappointed to find only copies of old children’s books. Despite this most of them have illustrations for tales he knows by heart, he is able to guess how the story goes.

 

Does Alice want to be a nurse? The illustrations of her in the book look like the uniforms Emmaline and Marina put on every morning. Wilhelm asks the nurse, and she says that Alice is too young to be a nurse. Wilhelm asks if she would like to be one when she was grown up, and the nurse says that Alice is just a character in a story. This causes Wilhelm to frown, not understanding what that had to do with anything. He quietly apologizes to Alice, and asks her if she was willing to tell him what an ‘enema’ is. When she does not answer he flips to the back of the book, and tries to make up a story based on looking at the pictures backwards. Somewhere in the back of his mind he wonders if he was aware his name was Wilhelm before today.


	4. Chapter 4

At night Wilhelm pretends to sleep as he listens to his sisters talk. They whisper about the government’s plan to detain people who sound like them. Apparently these plans are only rumors, but as Marina points out if the rumors proved true they might not be able to go home. The letters have become scarce in recent months, Marina is considering the possibility they might never come.

 

A child comes up to Wilhelm while he skips in circles at the park. After pushing him down the child calls him a hamburger. Wilhelm says that is a stupid joke, and the child retorts that hamburger is a stupid name. Wilhelm says that his last name isn’t actually “Hamburger”, it just sort of sounds like it. When the child hears how the name is actually pronounced he says it sounds like a nasty name, and repeatedly calls Wilhelm a nasty as he shoves his face into the sandbox.

 

The other children never really played with Wilhelm before, but now they crowd around him and jeer. A boy kicks dirt into his face with tears in his eyes, saying its Wilhelm’s fault his daddy is gone.

 

Wilhelm wrestles free and runs to where Emmaline sits reading her book. He points to the playground and tearfully demands her to tell the mean kids they don’t have a nasty name. The darkness that fleets behind Emmaline’s glasses makes Wilhelm nervous, and he looks about nervously as she tells him to sit down with her for a moment.

 

Daddy came from the place where the nasties live, but when he was there they hadn’t been nasty at all. She said that there was a big war before this one and in the aftermath everyone was afraid. A very bad man told everyone that if they did as he said they wouldn’t have to be scared anymore. They were so scared that they did everything he said, including the very bad things that made Wilhelm and his sisters need to separate from their parents.

 

When Emmaline finishes telling the story Wilhelm prefers to be alone. He doesn’t much feel like playing his harmonica or skipping in circles. Even when Emmaline had assured him Daddy wasn’t a nasty he still felt as though something was very wrong.

 

The war has gone on for four years now, and Marina and Emmaline say its too expensive to stay in the city. Emmaline suggests they should change their names as well. Only a little bit, Marina assures him. Emmaline would be Emily, Marina would be Mary, and Wilhelm was now Billy for some reason. Their last name was different too. Mary says it had been Mummy’s last name before she married Daddy, so technically it was still just as much their real last name as the other ones. Billy cries because he thinks his name will be sad if he changes it. His sisters look at each other in bafflement, and Billy thinks they are the most heartless people in all the world. He quietly promises to say his real name to himself sometimes so it will never feel like he’s forgotten it.

 

It wasn’t until Billy saw the luggage that he realized how much of their home didn’t belong to them. None of the furniture had been wrapped up, all the books remained on the shelves. All that they had packed were some of their clothes and a few of Billy’s toys. Lolly came out the crisp winter morning to bid them goodbye. She pressed a box into his hands and said it was for his next birthday, as she most likely wouldn’t be seeing him again. Billy cried and begged her to say she was lying, but she merely kissed his head and told him he was a good boy before wishing his sisters luck.

 

On the way to the station Billy passes his favorite place one last time but sees boards over the doors. Emily mutters that it had been a bad place, a bad place for bad men who did bad things to bad women. She is glad at least that Billy wont be playing nearby anymore.

 

The train cheered Billy up a little. He liked watching the scenery pass by as if the trees were having a race with each other. It all felt a bit like a prolog. Billy wondered when the conflict would arrive. When he thought there didn’t necessarily need to be one he became unsettled. To distract himself Billy pointed to his reflection when the skies became dark, and Mary told him he was the spitting image of their father.

 

The statement touches him deeply, though he is unable to decipher the feelings.

 

He remembers Lolly’s box and reaches under the seat where he had pushed it upon boarding the train. Opening the box he finds the tarnished gold of an old harmonica cased in purple velvet.


End file.
